


Lifeline

by betweenfactandbreakfast



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 20:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2786228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betweenfactandbreakfast/pseuds/betweenfactandbreakfast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anders and Merrill share a moment. Set shortly after the events of da2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lifeline

**Author's Note:**

> I really love how much these two have in common in terms of their arcs and personal motivations. I think they have the potential to be really good friends after the game ending, which is what this begins to explore!

She pads across the deck silently, one foot placed in front of the other with the precision and grace of the cats she used to see prowling around the alienage. Her feet are bare, and their paleness makes them glow in the dark. Bare feet make for better climbing, as Merrill loves to do. She is the one who sits in the crow’s nest and calls things out, a very important job, comes with a spyglass and everything. There hasn’t been anything to call out yet, but if there’s ever a ship to pillage (they aren’t actually going to pillage anything, says Isabela with a wistful look in her eye) on the horizon, Merrill will be the one to see it. Or a Templar vessel, seeing as they are all fugitives.  Merrill shivers with that thought- on this small boat, there is nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run but into the drink.

 It’s a still night, which means that Carver can sleep without having to expel the contents of his tea every five minutes, and she is alone.

Well, sort of.

There’s him. He’s there most nights, because he can’t sleep, and it’s better being alone than down in the mess (Why is it called a mess? Isabela always makes sure it’s perfectly tidy.) where Fenris glares and Carver looks disgusted. Or in his bunk where Varric’s snoring could drive the best man insane. (Merrill doesn’t want to be rude, but it _is_ incredibly loud!)  Up on deck, despite the whistling wind and the waves and the whip of rope and sail, it’s quieter.

Most of them won’t even talk to him. Only Merrill and Hawke and Isabela will say more than a few terse sentences to him. Hawke because she loves her friend, Isabela because she loves Hawke, and Merrill? Merrill speaks to him because she understands, and because she feels.

Most times he’ll stare into nothing, out onto the black of the ocean. Merrill wonders if he’s reliving the moment in his head, the building going up in ruby flame over and over, just as the death of her keeper goes through hers still when she closes her eyes. The moment when everything changed. The moment when they became Other. They became marked.

Merrill feels cold and damp under her feet, looks down- she’s stepped in a puddle that collected in the folds of spare sail last time it rained. The sails are drab and faded, nothing like the colourful ones of the aravels she’d grown up around. Still, it makes her heart hurt a little for home.

As Merrill approaches him from behind, she is reminded of the weeks she sat huddled in a corner of her house. If she closed her eyes she saw _it_ even clearer, so she kept them open, looking at cracks in her wall she’d never noticed before, or a rat, or the cobwebs that grew between her untouched staff and the wall.

Nobody trusted Anders with his staff at the moment, so he’d surrendered it to Hawke. Merrill hopes he’d get it back if anyone was injured, because neither she nor Hawke were much good at healing.

“Would you like a biscuit?” She says, fishing in her robes for the ones she’d pocketed before. It turned out that ship food was worse even than alienage food, because it mostly had to be things that could be stored for a long time. Salty jerky, dried mackerel sticks, biscuits. Isabela said there had to be fresh fruit on a ship or the sailors could get something called “scurvy”, so there were some crates of oranges too. Oh, and onions. Lots of onions.

 Anders jumps a little, probably not having noticed her on the deck until now. He turns, looks at her, but says nothing.

“Come on, you’ve got to eat something,” Merrill coaxes, holding the biscuit forward. He’s thinner now than she remembers him ever being, and just looks so _hollow_ , like there’s not much left of him anymore. And the shadows, Elgar’nan, the shadows under his eyes.

“Thanks,” Anders says, voice hoarse, taking the biscuit and nibbling at it.

Merrill deliberates for a moment, then sits, cross-legged, on the deck beside him. “I should have brought water,” she frets. “Those biscuits are so dry, you’ll need something to wash it down with, I expect. Oh, I wasn’t thinking at all, was I?”

“Merrill,” Anders interrupts. “It’s fine. You’ve been much too kind to me as it is. More than I deserve.”

“Don’t say that,” Merrill insists. “Everyone deserves a friend.”

“A friend,” Anders repeats, even issuing a small choked noise that Merrill thinks is supposed to be indifferent laughter. “It’s not a friend I deserve. It’s justice.”

Merrill reaches up and taps the side of his head. “You’ve already got that, remember?”

“Him? Are you joking? Would justice really kill innocents to further its ends?”

“Yes.” Merrill replies, simply.

Anders looks her properly in the eye for the first time, and says nothing.

“Anders, I-” Merrill begins, then stops. She’s not quite sure what it is she wants to say, only that she has to say it. “You can be sort of mean sometimes- quite mean, actually- but I don’t think you’re as bad of a person as you think you are.”

“How can you say that? You were there, you saw what I did. You know there’s blood on my hands.”

Merrill stands and wordlessly holds out her own palms to him. They’re crisscrossed with old blood magic scars that climb like vines up her wrists and arms. “You’re not the only one.”

He frowns, says nothing.

“I think.... I think people like Hawke, and Isabela, they’re lucky. When they make mistakes, it’s easily fixed. It’s all over. But some of us... we aren’t so lucky.” She takes a deep breath. “I still see her, you know. The Keeper. When I close my eyes, I see them all. Marethari, Tamlen, Mahariel, Pol. Everyone I’ve failed.”

 Even by the dim light of the moon and the lanterns hung around the deck, Merrill sees the glimmer of tears in his eyes. He hasn’t yet cried, to her knowledge. After the Keeper’s death, she had cried and cried until she was utterly hollow, insides scraped out and left wanting and raw as burning tears flooded over the vallaslin she no longer felt worthy of wearing.  

Something Merrill had learnt in her time in Kirkwall is how different people dealt with pain in different ways. Hawke makes jokes, tries to smile through it and brush it off like it’s nothing. Merrill remembers how forced-cheery she’d been after her Leandra’s death, and again after Isabela had run off. Isabela, as previously mentioned, tends to run in the other direction from pain. She came back for Hawke though. Varric writes stories. Fenris broods even more. Aveline and Carver hit things, Sebastian prays.

Up until now, she hadn’t known how Anders faced his own pain. He’d always been so busy, tending to the sick and the desperate, much too busy to stop and _feel_.

“It’s alright,” She says, timidly, quietly, unsure of it herself. “It’s going to be alright. I promise.”

She slips a small, scarred hand inside his larger one, feeling the calluses and burns that always marked a mage’s hands. After a moment, he squeezes her hand in return, holding on as if she were a lifeline.

Which, Merrill thinks to herself, she is perfectly willing to be.


End file.
